The Kt we loved

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Five years ago today, the world changed, for me and Anita
and all the people who knew and loved Katie.

And there isn’t much more to say than that. People often say
something “changed my world”, but what they usually really mean is just that it
was a big deal, not that it had permanent impact.

Our lives really did change that day. Katie
was our daughter, our student, our niece, our cousin, our friend. She was a
bright light, a force of nature. Every day we get up and go about our business,
and on a good day we don’t spend too much time missing her, although not doing
so also feels wrong, like a betrayal. But we don’t forget.

We sometimes manage to go longer periods without thinking
about her because time has scabbed over the wound. It hasn’t healed—it will
never heal—but there is a scab there, one that
anniversaries like this pick at, breaking bits loose. And like picking at scabs
when we were kids, it hurts but also feels good, because she was so important
to us.

I know she’d appreciate the following, one of many underrated
Davy Jones tracks:

We've got five years, stuck on my eyes
We've got five years, what a surprise
We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot
We've got five years, that's all we've got

Nice mixture of Sesame Street and Dr. Seuss there. Not an easy mashup to justify, but this one manages.

And finally, I was listening to CBC yesterday on XM, to a program talking about radicalization (apparently Canada, with a tenth the population of the U.S., has more people heading over to fight with ISIS than the States, which is bizarre). A caller was trying to sound reasoned and said, "I'm not just talking about radical Islam: there are radical separatists, and radical animal rights people, and radical Buddhists..." and I thought, "Radical Buddhists?! What do they do, tell you 'Become one with everything or...don't'??" (Actually it turns out he was right, there are radical Buddhists—who knew?)